Final Blog Post

In the Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Susie Salmon is 13 when she is raped then murdered by her neighbor Mr. Harvey. Everyone in her family deals with Susie's death in their own way. They all don't know how to get closure. Alice Sebold shows how death affects everyone differently.

When Jack Salmon (Susie's Dad) finds out his daughter is dead, he is devastated. At first he denies it and refuses to believe his eldest daughter is dead, but when they find her elbow he has to accept the fact he is never seeing his daughter again. He immediately becomes intent on finding out who the murderer is. When his wife abandons him, he has to be mother and father to his 2 other children, Lindsay and Buckley, and find closure for his daughters death. Throughout the book he has hard times controlling his anger about what has happened in his life. He destroys theses glass ships he used to build with Susie, when he sees someone moving in the cornfield where Susie died, he goes out and attacks them thinking it was her murderer when it was only one of Susie's old friends. He ends up being so sad he doesn't give his remaining kids all the love and attention they need. After 10 years, he learns to embrace his grief and anger and starts giving his kids all his love and attention instead of wasting it on Susie's murder.

Abigail Salmon(Susie's mother), uses her daughters death as a wake up call. When Susie dies, Abigail starts to think about all the thinks she wanted do with her life but never got the chance too. She doesn't want to be a housewife anymore. She still loves her 2 other childen, Lindasy and Buckley, but she despises the word the comes out of their lips everytimes they need her. "Mother". She doesn't want to be a mother when she has lost a child. She ends up leaving her family, and sets out to do all she ever wanted. It takes 10 years and her husband to have a heart attack to come home.By her leaving but then returning it shows how she just needed time to heal from losing her daughter.

Alice Sebold writes about many different ways to deal and accept death. Everyone in the story, all of Susie's friends, siblings, and even neighbors deals with her death differently. Alice Sebold shows us that is okay to deal with death differently and that no one will experience death in the same way.